The only way Pat Fitzgerald is coaching Northwestern when the 2023 season begins is if one of America’s elite academic institutions has decided that a guy who calls football plays is worth more than the pain and suffering of young men who weren’t just hazed when they arrived in his program but were reportedly violated, defiled and humiliated as part of a twisted so-called culture that is 100% his responsibility and now 100% his shame.
Even if you are naïve enough to believe that the person who has been leading Northwestern’s football program for the last 17 seasons didn’t know the exact ways that his upperclassmen were allegedly indoctrinating newcomers — or, as others may call it, sexual assault — Fitzgerald has utterly failed.
He failed in his duty to protect young men and he failed their families, whose living rooms he went into and promised to treat like his own family.
He failed to set a standard by which it would never occur in the first place for players in his program to do the vile things alleged Saturday by former players in the Daily Northwestern.
He failed to be the man he spent an entire career pretending that he was.
On Friday, Northwestern suspended Fitzgerald for two weeks this summer during a time when nothing much is happening in college football, expecting the cloud would pass by the time the real important work begins to make the Wildcats something other than the 1-11 embarrassment they were last season.
They dropped the news in a vague press release announcing the vague results of a vague investigation into a whistleblower’s accusations of hazing within the program.
Under the guise of an independent firm being unable to corroborate Fitzgerald’s culpability, they let him off with more of a pat on the head and an admonishment to do better — even though the firm itself said the accusations were “largely supported by evidence.”
But Northwestern’s student journalists found more. A lot more. A sickening amount more.
Accusations from former players that are so specific and perverse, it would be difficult to believe they are made up.
There were photos, too, of so-called traditions that revolve around unquestionably abusive behavior sold as team bonding. Simulated sexual acts. Compulsory nudity and forcible contact with other nude teammates. Spraying with water hoses. Sadly, much more.
Football has largely been dragged out of the stone ages, but Northwestern under Fitzgerald was apparently all-in on hazing like it was still the 1960s.
If the investigative firm had access to the same or similar information as the Daily Northwestern and the school still arrived at a two-week suspension, Fitzgerald isn’t the only high-ranking school official about to lose their job. If they didn’t, Northwestern should ask for its money back.
Much of Northwestern’s mystique under Fitzgerald had been rooted in his image as a Northwestern man through and through, a no-nonsense guy who found a way through toughness and love for his alma mater to stay competitive in the Big Ten at a place that had few advantages.
He was an overachiever: A heart-and-soul linebacker on the Wildcats’ 1995 Rose Bowl team, a 31-year-old assistant who had to step in when head coach Randy Walker died of a heart attack in 2006, and ultimately a Northwestern lifer when he spurned overtures from bigger schools and the NFL when success started to come his way.
Northwestern fans haven’t been happy with the record recently, but that seems small in comparison to what the school is dealing with now.
A broken trust with its fans and, more importantly, its players. A reputation of shame not only for what happened, but a meek and ineffective attempt to bury it under a Friday news release. A symbol of football’s cultural rot that needs to be cut out like a malignant tumor.
That’s what Northwestern now represents. That’s what Fitzgerald’s largely successful career has been reduced to.
At this point, Fitzgerald simply cannot be retained. This was his program, his locker room — all of it from the record to whatever was going on in the showers.
If he doesn’t own that, if the school doesn’t own that, he isn’t the man he wanted the world to see and Northwestern isn’t a university that deserves anyone’s respect.
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